In 2005, 62 residents of Montgomery County committed suicide. That number almost doubled in 2011 with 114 recorded suicides in the county.

Anthony Salvatore, the director of suicide prevention at the Montgomery County Emergency Service Inc. (MCES), said that the majority of people who commit suicide are middle-aged adults from the baby boomer generation.

Salvatore explained that the rate of suicides began to grow as the economy began to decline, and the number continued to rise through the worst of the recession and stayed at the same levels through the recovery.

After watching the number of suicides rise over the past eight years, Salvatore and a small group of people at MCES decided to put something together to complement the training of emergency personnel, but not replace it.

The first step of the program was to get booklets into the hands of the cadets at the police academy in Conshohocken and to various crisis training programs.

“We printed 1,000 and have gone through somewhere between 600 and 700,” Salvatore said.

Salvatore’s ultimate goal is to make the booklets available to all law enforcement and emergency responder agencies.

Police officers in the Upper Merion get more advanced training on how to deal with people who are threatening to take their own lives, in addition to the training they receive at the police academy, according to Officer Harry Nuskey, the department’s community relations officer.

Nuskey also said that officers have responded to 16 suicide threats and five attempts in the past six months. and once on the scene, it is up to the responding officers to stop victims from taking their own lives.

In the case of a threat, officers are trained to calm down the victims until they can get them to Building 50 in Norristown to receive psychiatric treatment, and in the event of an actual attempt, officers are instructed to use minimal physical force to restrain the person, Nuskey explained.

According to Nuskey, the Upper Merion police are happy with the training cadets receive and even more so with the kind of training that Building 50 provides for officers once they are hired.

In the case of EMS personnel, Salvatore said, EMTs in training may briefly go over crisis intervention, but a lot gets left out because of other types of training.